David Pogue of the New York Times interviews Dag Spicer, curator of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, on the important but little-noted issue of data rot:
Making lots of backups is good advice, and on different formats, different places; consider paper as an archival medium. Some paper we have has lasted thousands of years. If Moses had gotten the Ten Commandments on a floppy disk, it would never have made it to today.
In celebration of my visit to the Leadership Alive! conference in Asilomar, I’ve pulled out a song from the archives and remixed it. Here, then, is Connection to the Heart. I wrote the song as a modern-day doo-wop, modifying but mostly preserving the words of an affirmative prayer by Diane Moen. Paul Wurster’s on guitar, Jeremy Gibons on bass, and Jim Reinking on drums. I’m rocking out on synth strings, electric piano, and organ. Also backing vocals. Big fun.
Summertime — From the 2009 Metropolitan Rhythm & Blues Revue, a fundraiser for Cottage Grove school music programs. My solo begins at about 2:50.
Dr. Alex Benzer: I have a mini-confession to make: I wrote the Tao of Dating books specifically for really smart people. The writing of the books was precipitated by the endemic dating woes on the Harvard campus, as I observed them as an advisor and earlier, indulged in them as a student.
Those kids graduate and pretty much continue to have the same dating woes — only now with fewer single people around who happen to live in the same building and share meals with them every day. So if they had challenges then, it gets about 1000 times worse once they’re tossed from the warm womb of their alma mater.
From my observations, the following dating challenges seem to be common to most smart people. In fact, the smarter you are, the more clueless you will be, and the more problems you’re going to have in your dating life.
A quarter of a trillion dollars, if it comes to that, is an astounding amount of money to hand over to one company to prevent it from going bust. Yet the government feels it has no choice: because of A.I.G.’s dubious business practices during the housing bubble it pretty much has the world’s financial system by the throat. … A bailout of A.I.G. is really a bailout of its trading partners — which essentially constitutes the entire Western banking system.
